acting and poetry can be related
07/03/2006 05:45 p.m.
I feel like I need a journal entry to explain myself.

I feel like the current poems i've posted are so cynical.

My name is Jared, and I'm an actor. Most of my poetry, whether it appears so or not, is based on my thoughts in theatre.
Someday I shall write my own acting book, and it will be mediocre at best.
I'm struggling between the things I know, the things I feel, and the things that I want to be, but like a bad gambler, I'm praying for luck that what I want will be so.
It's not that I'm lazy. On the contrary, I am a very hard worker. I am still "in training" at a university to become an actor. I hate academia with a passion in my work, yet I am very very good at articulating my personal process and such of that nature.
Hence the struggle between intuition and knowledge.
Acting is one field where knowledge can be very very bad. An actor but be completely impulsive, yet they have to have the instinct to know when an impulse, once played out, was bad, and when was good. They need analytical skills to serve as a compass through their work, yet they cannot judge their work in the process.
In the end, acting is like throwing together a poem, or a painting, fairly quickly (perhaps making a few sketches before hand to judge what they would LIKE from a performance), and not judging it, but then throwing it out for the world to see, still unjudging even while the rest of the world is judging you, and then, finally, when the curtain is closed for the last time, you spend a good five months analyzing what went wrong in that performance.

I do not want to seem arrogant, but I have been in shows that have CHANGED people. Even if it was only for a few days, a week, or even 15 minutes. And I have been in shows that are, as we call it around my circle of friends, "emotional masturbation."

I wish more people would be excited about theatre, but theatre itself is a joke at times. Too many times have I seen selfish actors.
That's another thing about me. I am selfish yet completely unselfish at the same time. When I am working, in a role, I am completely and utterly open to making the other actor the best they could ever be. You are only as good as your partner in a scene, and I have been in small scenes where we were golden.

I've also been in a scene where my partner and I are talking to each other, but neither of us has taken anything in that the other said.

It's the bitter bitter struggle of an actor. It wouldn't seem difficult to REALLY do something, but it is.

My poetry is like my acting. I write on impulse, I do not judge it until it's finished (usually within five to ten minutes) ... I change anything I really disliked, again, very impulsively, listening to my instinct rather than my head, and then I am done. I do not touch it again.

I know as a writer (I am a playwright as well), that writing is rewriting is rewriting, to use the old cliche, but I do not enjoy analyzing my own work. If something hits me wrong, I will change it, but if not, I refuse to analyze my work for particular value or knowing what I did or did not do correctly. That is up to the critics and the readers. That is the actor in me.


I am currently Bothered